23 January 2013

The Fabulous Father Flannery

It’s depressing to see the Irish Times continuing to spin a line about the Redemptorist priest
Tony Flannery that is less about simple facts than about perpetuating a
narrative that the Catholic hierarchy, whether at home or in Rome, is out of
step with Irish society and the modern world.

Today’s editorial,
for instance, says that Tony Flannery and some of his colleagues are “under
threat due to their insistence on the importance of personal conscience”. This
could hardly be less true, not least because the Church is pretty bigonconscience; Peter
Kreeft puts it well, paraphrasing St Thomas Aquinas:

“if a Catholic comes to believe
the Church is in error in some essential, officially defined doctrine, it is a
mortal sin against conscience, a sin of hypocrisy, for him to remain in the
Church and call himself a Catholic, but only a venial sin against knowledge for
him to leave the Church in honest but partly culpable error.”

Tony Flannery can say what he likes; what he can’t do is say
what he likes as a Catholic priest, giving
the impression that it’s within the bounds of Catholicism. And as the head of Tony’s order stated today, Flannery’s
comments involved “fundamental areas of Catholic doctrine, including the
priesthood, the nature of the Church, and the Eucharist.”

How convenient...

Tony Flannery was one of a handful of priests who hit the
headlines last year after being disciplined by Rome; Brian
Darcy, whose ‘silencing’ was clearly nothing of the sort, was the most
famous of this batch, but Tony Flannery, as one of the founders and leaders of
the Association of Catholic Priests, may be even more important.

One of his brothers, Frank Flannery, is a close confidante
and adviser of Enda Kenny; it’s been speculated that Enda’s
line on Cloyne may have ultimately derived – perhaps by an indirect route –
from Tony Flannery. Certainly, Tony Flannery welcomed
the speech; I’m not quite sure why, given his own opposition to mandatory
reporting of abuse allegations, which led Ian
Elliott, the Irish Church’s chief child protection officer, to criticise
him for what Elliott described as “an attempt at minimising the serious nature
of clerical child abuse”.

This weekend, in the aftermath of the big Dublin
pro-life vigil, the New York Times reported that Tony Flannery intended to break his silence about what he regards as an
inquistition-style campaign against him by Rome because of his line on certain
aspects of Church teaching.

The story seems to have broken at a rather inconvenient time
for the Irish Church, just after having its new
primate-to-be announced and fresh from helping rally 25,000 people onto the
streets of Dublin in the biggest counter-government demonstration since Enda
Kenny became Taoiseach. And isn’t that handy, given that Tony Flannery is
brother to one of Enda Kenny’s right-hand men?

The dog that used to bark...

Anyway, the Irish Times ran a column similar to
the New York Times one on their
website on Sunday morning, it having come from the Press Association; shortly
after running the piece, however, they redacted what was probably the most
important part of it.

The redacted paragraphs were substantively identical to these
three from the New York Times piece:

“In the letter, the Vatican
objected in particular to an article published in 2010 in Reality, an Irish
religious magazine. In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest,
wrote that he no longer believed that ‘the priesthood as we currently have it
in the church originated with Jesus’ or that he designated ‘a special group of
his followers as priests.’

Instead, he wrote, ‘It is more
likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the
community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the
occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.’

Father Flannery said the Vatican
wanted him specifically to recant the statement, and affirm that Christ
instituted the church with a permanent hierarchical structure and that bishops
are divinely established successors to the apostles.”

With these removed, the Irish
Times gives the impression that Tony Flannery got into trouble because of his
openness to women priests and married priests, and his line on homosexuality,
contraception, and communion for married divorcees. The reaction to this
narrative has been utterlypredictable,
given how, as the Irish Timessays,
in connection with lastyear’s misconceived ACP survey, “Fr Flannery is correct when he speaks of a disconnect
between the Irish laity and Rome.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure Rome’s not happy about any of
that either, not least because there’s a duty on priests to try to bridge such
disconnects, but that’s not what's caused this.

The heart of the matter...

Rather, the main issue here is that Tony Flannery rejected the very idea of a sacramental priesthood as founded by Christ. Leaving aside how
this would have put him in a position as paradoxical as it would be untenable, it was clearly something that Rome couldn’t
let go.

Rome didn’t have much choice in this. Its hands were tied. Indeed, if Father Flannery’s in danger of excommunication – and seemingly,
despite his claims, he was never
threatened with this, which the Irish Times could surely have discovered if it had bothered – it’s because he pretty much put himself out of
communion by denying the sacramental reality of Holy Orders. That’s the way
excommunication works: in practice you excommunicate yourself, and the Church
only tells you what you’ve done.

I’d even wonder whether by claiming that the Last Supper has
historically been misrepresented by the Church he implicitly cast doubt on
the sacramental reality of the Eucharist, and indeed almost all the sacraments
and the basic authority of the Church. I think that may be what the head of the
Irish Redemptorists meant when he spoke of Tony Flannery being ambiguous on
this point.

The CDF’s dealings with Tony Flannery will have been
designed to help him realise the seriousness and implications of what he’s said
so he can figure out in conscience where he stands, ideally with a view to him
coming afresh to an acceptance of Church teaching

Now that's not quite true, is it, Tony?

Monday morning’s paper saw the misleading effect that the
redacted article conveyed being heavily pushed. Despite being about a central,
fundamental, and essentially internal Catholic issue, the entire story was
presented as yet another piece in the long-running Irish Times storyline I call ‘Catholic
Hierarchy out of step with modern life’.

Tony
Flannery sulks in Monday’s paper that the CDF has never approached him
directly, describing how he’d been summoned to Rome to answer to the head of
his order. He shouldn’t have seen anything sinister in that, the Church being best
understood not as a neat pyramid but as a loose network of largely autonomous
organisations; a Redemptorist priest who’d taken a vow of obedience, Tony Flannery is subject to a line management system, for want of a better phrase, which Rome
was respecting.

On meeting the head of his order, he was faced with a choice
he said he found impossible:

“Either I sign a statement, for
publication, stating that I accepted teachings that I could not accept, or I
would remain permanently banned from priestly ministry, and maybe face more
serious sanctions. It is important to state clearly that these issues were not
matters of fundamental teaching, but rather of church governance.”

Of course, this is rather at odds with today’s statement
from the head of the Irish Redemptorists, and it’s telling that Tony Flannery
glosses over how he denied the very basis of the priesthood; this cannot be
dismissed as a mere matter of Church governance, being quite clearly a matter
of fundamental teaching.

Feed my lambs... tend my sheep... feed my sheep...

Remember: Tony Flannery had denied the sacramental nature of
the priesthood, saying that he no longer believed it had been instituted by
Christ, and that it was, in effect, the creation of an elite who usurped power
in the Church. I have no idea what he means when he says the Creed and says he
believes in an ‘apostolic Church’.

It is quite possible to argue this, of course: it’s a
commonplace of Protestant theology, for instance, with Protestants generally rejecting the
notion of a sacramental priesthood instituted by Christ, and tending to believe
only in the broader ‘priesthood of all believers’. But that’s the thing: that’s
a Protestant view, and one completely incompatible with Catholicism.

“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in
1908, “but they are the walls of a playground.” Shepherds are meant to
protect their sheep, and it’s the job of the Church to step in when one of its
priests teaches something that is utterly contrary to Catholic teaching. It’s
not hasty about doing so, either: Tony Flannery’s spent years away from the Catholic mainstream, but in denying the sacramental basis of the
priesthood he clearly went too far.

The Irish Times is
putting forward a profoundly misleading narrative of what’s happened here, and sadly,
where the Irish Times misleads, otherstendtofollow,.
It may simply be that they think their readers wouldn’t care about issues of
ecclesiology, but the fact remains that by stripping the story of its most
important element they distort the story profoundly. So much for the ‘Story of Why?’.

2 comments:

Excellent post. The most disturbing thing of all is the connection with Fine Gael and Enda Kenny's outrageous attack on Pope Benedict. Here is a link to MidWest Irish Radio's programme by Fr Brendan Hogan and Monica Morley with an interview with Fr Flannery. In it he says he travelled to Rome with his brother Frank to discuss matters with his congregation. All very strange. http://midwest.radica.com/asx/faith.asx

I flit between Ireland and England, skulking round churches, libraries, and museums, wetting my throat rather less often than I’d like, but perhaps more often than I should.
I suspect that the secret of life lies in laughter and humility, that only living things can go against the stream, that the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man, and that placed as sentinels of an unknown watch, we have a duty to whistle.
I think even more than I talk, and on good days I do so in that order.